by Angela Blair

Created on: February 24, 2010

"Ain’t you Georgie’s girl?" The question has been posed by an elderly cowboy in my long-ago-left, small, central Texas home town. "Yes, sir, I am," I reply as I try to place him in the mists of memory some 60 years past. "Well, yore mama was mite near the purtiest woman I ever saw in my whole life," the old gentleman continued. I agreed with him and as he seemed interested in visiting a bit I sat down on the old bench in front of the post office. I’d been to the local cemetery and had decided to stop in the rapidly disappearing "down town" area and stroll a bit.

We sat there in the sun, quietly. He took a package of Red Man Chewing Tobacco out of his back pocket, opened it and stuck a chaw in his mouth. I stared out over what used to be a bustling, little town - the town of my birth, my childhood and deepest, fondest memories. I knew my elderly companion fit somewhere in my past but couldn’t place him. Obviously, he had the advantage as he knew I was "Georgie’s girl." My mother’s given name was actually "Georgia" but for folks with country ways; the Texas country vernacular was normal and every rural Texan understands the broken, homesy-folksie style of speaking.

Small towns in central Texas are all similar in that they're off-the-beaten-path, rural communities, have no industry and offer few services or conveniences. Those who still reside in them usually commute to work elsewhere to survive economically but refuse to give up a more relaxed, close-knit community life style. When they retire they continue keeping a few head of cows to supplement retirement income. In the alternative, some never leave at all or come "home" to retire and scratch a hard scrabble living out of the dry Texas earth by raising cows, goats and "doing without." Many small towns in Texas are victims of progress - or lack thereof - and their eventual demise, although most likely inevitable, is always a long and painful process. As I look around me; that seems to be the condition of my beloved home town.

"Where you livin’ now?" the old gentleman asked as he shifted his mouth full of tobacco to the other side of his jaw and then spit off to one side. "I moved back to central Texas to take care of Mama in 1998 after my step-dad passed away. Mama died in 2001 and somehow I just never left again," I replied. "Well, that’s good – ever body oughta go back home when they get old so they’ll be on home

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